Data Protection in Transition to the Cloud

Organizations of all types and sizes are moving many, but usually not all, applications and data to public and private clouds, and the hybrid environments thus created are an increasing challenge for those responsible for data protection. There are many new services available in the cloud for backup and disaster recovery that can help, but IT managers want to avoid setting up separate data protection procedures for each of the parts of their hybrid environments.

Learning Objectives

- Have a clear understanding of how current trends in data protection and in cloud-based computing and storage are impacting each other.
- Gain increased knowledge regarding new cloud-based alternative approaches for data protection.
- Have the ability to make good decisions when changes in data protection are required by new hybrid in-house plus cloud environments.

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification helps to provide a unified approach for the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers. Swordfish builds on the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF’s) Redfish® specification using the same easy-to-use RESTful methods and lightweight JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formatting. Join this session to receive an overview of Swordfish including the new functionality added in version 1.0.6 released in March, 2018.

One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write and read it.

In this webcast, we'll compare three types of data access: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own use cases, and advantages and disadvantages; each provides simple to sophisticated data management; and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files better, and what advantages or disadvantages they have compared to each other. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! (where it beat its human competitors) and was then used in commercial applications, the first of which was helping with lung cancer treatment.

NetApp is now using IBM Watson in Elio, a virtual support assistant that responds to queries in natural language. Elio is built using Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities. These enable Elio to analyze unstructured data by using natural language processing to understand grammar and context, understand complex questions, and evaluate all possible meanings to determine what is being asked. Elio then reasons and identifies the best answers to questions with help from experts who monitor the quality of answers and continue to train Elio on more subjects.

Elio and Watson represent an innovative and novel use of large quantities of unstructured data to help solve problems, on average, four times faster than traditional methods. Join us at this webcast, where we’ll discuss:

Benchmarking storage performance is both an art and a science. In this 5th installment of the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum’s “Storage Performance Benchmarking” series, our experts take on optimizing performance for various workloads. Attendees will gain an understanding of workload profiles and their characteristics for common Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications and learn how to identify application workloads based on I/O profiles to better understand the implications on storage architectures and design patterns. This webcast will cover:
•An introduction to benchmarking storage performance of workloads
•Workload characteristics
•Common Workloads (OLTP, OLAP, VMware, etc.)
•Graph fun!

In the enterprise, block storage typically handles the most critical applications such as database, ERP, product development, and tier-1 virtualization. The dominant connectivity option for this has long been Fibre Channel SAN (FC-SAN), but recently many customers and block storage vendors have turned to iSCSI instead. FC-SAN is known for its reliability, lossless nature, 2x FC speed bumps, and carefully tested interoperability between vendors. iSCSI is known for running on ubiquitous Ethernet networks, 10x Ethernet speed bumps, and supporting commodity networking hardware from many vendors.

As the storage world moves to more flash and other non-volatile memory, more cloud, and more virtualization (or more containers), it’s time to revisit one of the great IT debates: Should you deploy Fibre Channel or iSCSI? Attend this SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast to learn:
•Will Fibre Channel or iSCSI deliver faster performance? Does it depend on the workload?
•How is the wire speed race going between FC and iSCSI? Does anyone actually run iSCSI on 100GbE? When will 128Gb Fibre Channel arrive?
•Do Linux, Windows, or hypervisors have a preference?
•Is one really easier [to install/manage] than the other, or are they just different?
•How does the new NVMe over Fabrics protocol affect this debate?

Join SNIA experts as they compare FC vs. iSCSI and argue in an energetic yet friendly way about their differences and merits of each.

After you watch the webcast check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=680

This Webcast will provide a short Tutorial-style briefing of the EU-General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), and then delve into the Roles and Responsibilities of the Data Protection Officer (DPO). After the short briefing, a Panel Discussion with Q&A from audience participation will take place.

In a recent survey of enterprise hybrid cloud users, the Evaluator Group saw that nearly 60% of respondents indicated that lack of interoperability is a significant technology-related issue that they must overcome in order to move forward. In fact, lack of interoperability was chosen above public cloud security and network security as significant inhibitors. This webcast looks at enterprise hybrid cloud objectives and barriers with a focus on cloud interoperability within the storage domain and the SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative to promote interoperability and portability of data stored in the cloud.

ESG, in cooperation with SNIA Europe, will present the key findings from the 2017 European Storage Research Report. The content will focus on key areas of technology spending and forecasts, as well as highlighting customer reaction to the adoption of new storage technologies.

Public, private and hybrid cloud are nothing new, but protecting sensitive data stored on these servers is still of the utmost concern. The NSA is no exception.

It recently became publicized that the contents of a highly sensitive hard drive belonging to the NSA (National Security Agency) were compromised. The virtual disk containing the sensitive data came from an Army Intelligence project and was left on a public AWS (Amazon Web Services) storage server, not password-protected.

This is one of at least 5 other leaks of NSA-related data in recent years. Not to mention the significant number of breaches and hacks we’ve experienced lately, including Yahoo!, Equifax, WannaCry, Petya, and more.

The culprit in this case? Unprotected storage buckets. They have played a part in multiple other recent exposures, and concern is on the rise. When it comes to storing data on public cloud servers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace and more, what are the key responsibilities of Storage Architects and Engineers, CIOs and CTOs to avoid these types data leaks?

Tune in with Chris Vickery, Director of Cyber Risk Research at UpGuard and the one who discovered the leak, along with George Crump, Chief Steward, Storage Switzerland, David Linthicum, Cloud Computing Visionary, Author & Speaker, Charles Goldberg, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Thales e-Security, and Mark Carlson, Co-Chair, SNIA Technical Council & Cloud Storage Initiative, for a live panel discussion on this ever-important topics.

SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) doubles in speed with the release of each new generation. The newest speed bump is 24G SAS, with end-user products anticipated in 2019. In addition to effectively doubling the speed from the current 12Gb/s SAS, 24G SAS has optimizations for both SSD and HDD. The end result is a highly scalable, highly flexible technology that optimizes use of the storage devices released today. This presentation provides an overview of why 24G SAS will be the protocol of choice for all-flash deployments, data centers, as well as tiered or cached systems with both HDD and SSD components.

The ecosystem of Persistent Memory is here. Are you on board? Don’t miss this “fundamentals” webcast on what you need to know about perhaps the most significant change to computer architecture since the transistor. Learn how system memory and storage are uniting into a single entity, how SNIA is contributing to addressing persistent memory via a programming model, and how persistent memory is being implemented today via NVDIMMs.

Come hear about what Real World Storage Workloads are and why they are so important to Datacenter server performance. See SNIA SSSI Reference IO Captures on Testmyworkload.com that are being used to develop new SNIA Technical Specifications. After an overview of RWSWs and their key metrics, see an analysis of a 2,000 Outlet Retail Web Portal 24-Hr SQL Server workload. The same SQL Server workload is then used to test four Datacenter SSDs and a SAS HDD.

We’re all accustomed to transferring money from one bank account to another; a credit to the payer becomes a debit to the payee. But that model uses a specific set of sophisticated techniques to accomplish what appears to be a simple transaction. We’re also aware of how today we can order goods online, or reserve an airline seat over the Internet. Or even simpler, we can update a photograph on Facebook. Can these applications use the same models, or are new techniques required?

One of the more important concepts in storage is the notion of transactions, which are used in databases, financials, and other mission critical workloads. However, in the age of cloud and distributed systems, we need to update our thinking about what constitutes a transaction. We need to understand how new theories and techniques allow us to undertake transactional work in the face of unreliable and physically dispersed systems. It’s a topic full of interesting concepts (and lots of acronyms!). In this webcast, we’ll provide a brief tour of traditional transactional systems and their use of storage, we’ll explain new application techniques and transaction models, and we’ll discuss what storage systems need to look like to support these new advances.

And yes, we’ll explain all the acronyms and nomenclature too.

You will learn:

•A brief history of transactional systems from banking to Facebook
•How the Internet and distributed systems have changed and how we view transactions
•An explanation of the terminology, from ACID to CAP and beyond
•How applications, networks & particularly storage have changed to meet these demands

Ten years ago, the SNIA 100-Year Archive Task Force developed a survey with the goal to determine the requirements for long-term digital information retention in the data center - requirements needed to frame the definition of best practices and solutions to the retention and preservation problems unique to large,scalable data centers.

Now in 2017, SNIA presents a new survey developed to assess the following details:

1. Who needs to retain long term information
2. What information needs to be retained and for how long
3. If organizations are able to meet their retention needs
4. How long term information is stored, secured and preserved

Join us as we see where we were and where we need to be in the preservation and retention of data.

Storage can be something of a “black box,” a monolithic entity that is at once mysterious and scary. That’s why we created “The Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask” webcast series. So far, we’ve explored various and sundry aspects of storage, focusing on “the naming of the parts.” Our goal has been to break down some of the components of storage and explain how they fit into the greater whole.

This time, however, we’re going to open up Pandora’s Box and peer inside the world of storage management, uncovering some of the key technologies that are used to manage devices, storage traffic, and storage architectures. In particular, we’ll be discussing:

There’s so much to say on each of these subjects we could do a full webcast on any one of them, but for a quick overview of many of the technologies that affect storage in one place, we think you will find your time has been well spent.

Check out the Q&A blog from this webcast http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=658

The use of cloud object storage is ramping up sharply, especially in the public cloud, to reduce capital budgets and operating expenses. However, enterprises are challenged with legacy applications that do not support standard protocols to move data to and from the cloud.

Enterprises have developed strategies specific to the public cloud for Data Protection, Archive, Application development, DevOps, Big Data Analytics and Cognitive Artificial Intelligence. However, these same organizations have legacy applications and infrastructure that are not cloud friendly.

Object storage is a secure, simple, scalable, and cost-effective means of managing the explosive growth of unstructured data enterprises generate every day. Gateways enable SMB and NFS data transfers to be converted to Amazon’s S3 protocol while optimizing data with deduplication and providing QoS efficiency on the data path to the cloud.

This webcast will highlight the market trends toward the adoption of object storage and the use of gateways to execute a cloud strategy, the benefits of object storage when gateways are deployed, and the use cases that are best suited to leverage this solution.

Join this webcast to learn:
•The benefits of object storage when gateways are deployed
•Primary use cases for using object storage and gateways in private, public or hybrid cloud
•How gateways can help achieve the goals of your cloud strategy without
retooling your on-premise infrastructure and applications

Come hear about what Real World Storage Workloads are and why they are so important to Datacenter server performance.
See SNIA SSSI Reference IO Captures on Testmyworkload.com that are being used to develop new SNIA Technical Specifications.
After an overview of RWSWs and their key metrics, see an analysis of a 2,000 Outlet Retail Web Portal 24-Hr SQL Server workload.
The same SQL Server workload is then used to test four Datacenter SSDs and a SAS HDD.

In this, the seventh entry in the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series we look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click “save,” for example, where does it actually go?

When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don’t understand what happens behind the scenes. It’s important to understand multiple aspects of the type of storage our data goes to along with their associated benefits and drawbacks as well as some of the protocols used to transport it.

Many people get nervous when they see that many acronyms, but all too often they come up in conversation, and you’re expected to know all of them? Worse, you’re expected to know the differences between them, and the consequences of using them? Even worse, you’re expected to know what happens when you use the wrong one?

We’re here to help.

It’s an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes.

Please join us on August 1st for another edition of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=643

Containers can make it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed. This webcast, presented by the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative and the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, will discuss how persistent memory is a revolutionary technology, which will boost the performance of next-generation packaging of applications and libraries into containers.

You’ll learn:
•What SNIA is doing to advance persistent memory
•What the ecosystem enablement efforts are around persistent memory solutions
•How NVDIMMs are paving the way for plug-n-play adoption into containers environments

Join SNIA experts, Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-chair, Chad Thibodeau, SNIA Cloud Storage member and Alex McDonald Co-chair of SNIA Solid State Storage and SNIA Cloud Storage Initiatives to find out what customers, storage developers, and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a container environment.

Standards organizations like SNIA are in the vanguard of describing cloud concepts and usage, and (as you might expect) are leading on how and where security fits in this new world of dispersed and publicly stored and managed data. In this webcast, SNIA experts Eric Hibbard and Mark Carlson will take us through a discussion of existing cloud and emerging technologies (such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Analytics & Big Data, and so on) – and explain how we’re describing and solving the significant security concerns these technologies are creating. They will discuss emerging ISO/IEC standards, SLA frameworks and security and privacy certifications. This webcast will be of interest to managers and acquirers of cloud storage (whether internal or external), and developers of private and public cloud solutions who want to know more about security and privacy in the cloud.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a non-profit organization made up of member companies spanning information technology. A globally recognized and trusted authority, SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement and security of information.